Is a Labour Majority Inevitable?

Four years - a lifetime in politics

At exactly 10pm on General Election night 2019, the BBC, ITV and Sky published their shared Exit poll revealing that Boris Johnson had led the Conservatives to their largest majority since Margaret Thatcher in 1987. In contrast, Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, had won their lowest number of seats since 1935.

As the evening wore on, real votes piled up and were counted. The exit poll was proven to be, once again, correct. Commentators and pundits filled the airwaves declaring, with some confidence, that a majority of this scale “guaranteed” Boris Johnson a decade in power, and that, having lost four General Elections in a row, Labour were now broken and “out of power for a generation”.

But if a week is a long time in politics, four years is a lifetime. Early predictions of Johnson’s invincibility and Labour’s demise were proven exaggerated. Since December 2021, polls have consistently put Labour ahead of the Conservatives, with pollsters reporting a gap regularly ranging between 14-20 points over the past year. With the SNP’s decade-long Scottish hegemony imploding, some commentators now declare a UK Labour majority as “inevitable” and predict a Labour landslide. But is it?

Labour's monumental challenge

The arithmetic is clear. Labour faces a monumental challenge and would need a swing greater than Tony Blair achieved in 1997 to be confident of a majority of one. Once the draft Order is approved by the Privy Council, the Parliamentary boundary changes will be confirmed, and Labour will require 124 net gains for a majority. However, the Conservatives need only lose 45 seats to be deprived of their majority…

While the Government’s approval ratings are low, Labour support appears to be stubbornly shallow. Polling evidence suggests that many 2019 Conservative voters, however disillusioned, have not yet transferred to other parties in great numbers. Many remain undecided.

In his personal leadership ratings, Starmer is seen as more credible than his predecessor - yet his favourability ratings remain relatively weak. Critics argue he has yet to inspire the public in the way that a young Tony Blair had done by 1995.

Evidence from actual results in recent local and by elections has also been less emphatic:

The Local Elections: The Tories lost badly, but Labour underperformed

Back in May, the Conservatives lost control of nearly 50 councils and approximately 1,050 seats — almost one in three of all they were defending. For the first time in over 20 years, they have fewer councillors than Labour across Great Britain. It was a damning verdict on the Government’s recent record.

By comparison, Labour’s own performance was good rather than exceptional. Labour’s gains of 500+ seats and 20-odd councils were the party’s best local election showing for more than a decade - but in the context of recent opinion poll leads, were at the lower end of expectations. The electorate seemed to cast a vote for whichever party locally seemed best placed to beat the Tories – a combination of Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens, Independents and Others. Unlike the Local Elections of 1995 – when Blair’s New Labour was the clear winner - this time Starmer’s Labour were not the sole beneficiary.

In an analysis for The Sunday Times, Professors Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher calculated a “national equivalent vote” of how the parties would have fared if these elections had taken place in every part of the country.

Their analysis put the Tories on 29% - their lowest point on this measure since 2013. Labour was on 36%, up five points on 2019 – but, surprisingly, only a marginal improvement on the year before.

Significantly, this equates to a near ten percentage point swing from the Tories to Labour since December 2019. Repeated at a general election on a uniform swing, these figures would lead to a hung Parliament with Labour as comfortably the largest party… but still short of a majority.

Recent By-elections raise further questions

Later in July, following the pattern of previous Westminster by-elections in recent years, and echoing the pattern seen at the Local Elections, voters registered their dissatisfaction with the Government by switching to whichever opposition party were best positioned to defeat the conservative candidate. Such a pattern of tactical voting if repeated at the General Election could seriously magnify the scale of Conservative losses, leaving leading psephologist Professor Sir John Curtice to conclude that the party remains in “very substantial electoral trouble.”

However, Labour needed just a 7.5% swing from the Conservatives to capture Boris Johnson's former Uxbridge and Ruislip seat - a key target at the next election. Yet the party fell a little short of what was needed and achieved well below the 15% swing to the party suggested in the national polls. All parties cited the impact of “local issues” and the ULEZ-expansion as central to the result, Labour’s failure to take Uxbridge raised awkward questions about the effectiveness of Starmer’s wider electoral strategy, as well as exposing fault-lines between the party leadership, Labour’s own mayor of London, and swing voters.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey was understandably delighted at his fourth by-election win this Parliament. However, history also shows that despite the Lib Dems having a notable tradition of winning by-elections – there is evidence that such gains usually revert-back soon after. Of the six by-election Liberal Democrat victories between 1997-2019, the party lost four at the subsequent general election. In addition, Davey has struggled to channel his by-election successes into a sustained wider revival for his party. Whereas Labour has resurged in the national polls, the Liberal Democrats have made minimal progress on their 2019 performance under Jo Swinson.

But with voters in flux, much can change in the coming twelve months.